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Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Window Sex Project: An Update

I. CURRENT EVENTS

Unless you've been under a rock in the past 48 hours, you have by now seen the infamous viral video on street harassment of a woman walking for 10 hours in New York City. This video has brought the conversation on street harassment from a buzz to a ROAR in mainstream media, faster than I was prepared for. Seriously, yesterday so many important interweb conversations were happening that I could not even fully participate in because... hello life. hello jobs that pay my rent. So I'm not EVEN gonna try.

What I am gonna do is direct you to Ebony.com where Senior Editor Jamilah Lemeiux breaks it down so it can forever be broke. She begins with a childhood memory about witnessing her mother being harassed. Lemeiux writes:

She shrank. I’d never seen her do that before, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I’ve seen her do that since.

So began my introduction to the pain of street harassment, the toxic byproduct of a global patriarchy; a set of behaviors that are condoned, if not affirmed, by the widely-held belief that women’s bodies belong to the public and that leaving one’s home means that you are available, accessible and ripe for the picking.

SLMDances' work on street harassment with The Window Sex Project is ongoing. Since we began this work in 2011, organizing with women in Harlem to create a space for them to share their stories and feel whole despite the constant barrage of unwanted attention in public space, we have built consciousness on street harassment with direct engagement of more than 1500 people. Which means our work - addressing street harassment through the use of the body (the site of harassment) and art making - is echoing into the world beyond what I could ever imagine. We have illuminated the street harassment conversation through:

Every new dancer who comes into the company is introduced to this issue, SLMDances' method of organizing, the choreography + performance itself, and how to facilitate our community workshops. I didn't know it when I started this work, but we are going to be dancing this dance until a significant cultural shift ACTUALLY OCCURS. When women are allowed TO BE, in their own right, in public space.

We want to do this work. We want to dance with you. We want to create space for women's + LGBTQ stories. We want to have organized community conversations that facilitate understanding amongst the genders. We want to break through patriarchy and institutional racism and other structural oppressions that reveal themselves with something as simple as a walk down the street.